[tl;dr: per-packet coloring is now supported in tshark (command-line
Wireshark) with --color]

I regularly use
tshark
when doing protocol work, often several times per week. It’s a great way to
take load off my brain instead of constantly parsing packets with my eyeballs
directly from a raw hex dump. tshark is like tcpdump on steroids,
providing me the majority of the benefits of Wireshark but without having to
leave the terminal, use the mouse, or slurp a .pcap file around between
machines. With tshark I can usually just view the .pcap file on the same
server I used to capture it.

At work I deal with a lot of hexadecimal and binary arithmetic. Some of it
I can do in my head with little effort – most addition is pretty easy, most
hex/decimal/binary conversions are easy for small values – but the rest of it
is tedious and distracting to convert by hand. There are lots of tools out
there to help with these calculations but none of them met my needs:

[tl;dr: Vim syntax highlighting for the mscgen, msgenny, Xù languages is now
available on GitHub.]

At work I’ve been working on a large design document that involves some wire
protocol work. It’s often helpful when explaining wire protocols to use
packet/protocol sequence diagrams (sometimes called ladder diagrams, but that
term is ambiguous if you’re a different type of electrical engineer).

A few weeks ago I moved this blog from Blogger (davegoodell.blogspot.com) to
GitHub Pages (blog.goodell.io). Redirects should be in place from any old
links to their new home, but it’s possible that I missed something somehow.
I also updated the underlying feed backing
the Feed Burner feed, so any
subscribers using that might have seen the migration as a reposting of all the
old posts. Sorry for the spam in your feed reader.

If you see any problems, drop me a line
via email or
on Twitter and I’ll straighten things out.